Animation Import/Export in Maya

hello and welcome to the tutorial about animation exporting and export in Maya so let's say that you've just got a new character rigged up and you want to check the weighting of your character because you think it looks pretty good one of the things that Maya allows you to do is export an animation file and it has no other information than the animation that runs throughout the hierarchy of your characters so if we were to open up the controls for this character all of these have little keyframes on them and it will not export any of this geometry but it will export the hierarchy of animation with it so similar to the way that you can see that the construction here in the hierarchy of the control sets are in a particular order you need to make sure that you understand that Maya is not exporting animation as one lump sum total but it is actually adhering to the same hierarchical structure so you can export animation as and you can import it as long as the structure is verbatim it is exactly the same as the one you exported it from so if I were to explore it from this node it has an entirely different structure then if I were to explore this node and the reason is because this is how Maya thinks if your hierarchy is your arm leg head toes finger controller your animation will have that same hierarchy when you export it and if you import it into something where the top note is missing then this animation propagates two totally different constraints and if you've added something on after you've exported the animations then you need to make sure that it's at the very end of the existing hierarchy so it is not disruptive to the existing hierarchy that you've exported animation from so things have to track you understand the hierarchy is thus Maya needs the animation to be exported in exactly the same structure so with that in mind we can come in and with this character right now he's animated animated using a particular type of animation that I like to use called the yoga animation and that is that when you're done rigging a character I've done an animation that pretty much confined it to one joint at a time one or two joints at a time so that when you scrub through the animation you can see it testing just those joints so for instance the first couple of frames or this 420 frame period are gonna be the ika hand controllers coming in and out and then I test the shoulders things like that and so pretty much every part of the body has a go at just doing one thing at a time so you can come over here and sort of gauge whether or not the weighting is good for the character and it's a good way to sort of check your your character because if you're gonna continue doing a bipedal rig or if you're going to continue using sky rigger with the same scaled character so for instance if you had a much smaller character rigged and you want to cut and paste the animation remember that this animation is translation so it's going to come right there in space the rest of this stuff like rotation is inconsequential to the characters scale because a rotate of 90 degrees is going to be the same no matter what size it is so when you're dealing with the FK rig you're fine it's when you deal with the eye care it you're dealing with specifics so the hands right here going back and forth so this is what I call a yoga animation it's what I'd like to keep on file just as an animation file because after I'm done rigging up a character I can quickly put it onto this rig making sure that everything is prepared for a six foot high rigged character for instance and then I can sit back and sort of check the weighting of the character by virtue of using this yoga animation so to come in and make sure that you have it installed you have to come up here to Windows and go over to settings preferences and go pop down to your plug-in manager so when you have that up and running come over to and an import-export and make sure it's not only loaded but make sure it's auto loaded these are checked off you're not going to be able to export something as an animation file so come in here and click on loaded which means it will be loaded for the current session of Maya but also Auto load if you're going to be continuing to use this because it automatically loads it next time you bring it up in Maya so with this selected what you can do is come up to the very top again I'm being very careful to grab the very top and I have some innovation this cannot be blank if you want the animation of your character to be exported be sure that you've got at least one keyframe throughout because that helps Maya understand that everything has a value so even if it's not moving right now on some of these there are only single key frames it does establish a sort of a pin in each of these different constraints that has a value if it doesn't you might be asking my to think about things that it's not very good at so make sure you have at least one keyframe per constraint for your character and grab the topmost parent of that hierarchy and then go over to Maya and right here I'm going to Maya and export selection go into the selections for that you should have the selection now for annum export at the very bottom so with it selected you want to make sure that you've got these options and of export default extensions you want to have all of these options sets so that you are going to get all the animation that goes throughout the hierarchy if you do not make sure that below is checked you're only going to actually be exporting the topmost nodes hierarchy or topmost nodes animation so make sure you've clicked on below and everything else should be time range you want the entire time range and you should be able to go from there just export the selection it should take you to wherever you've saved or you want to save your animation and I've already previously saved this but it will be a dot anim file and this is my first variation of yoga this is the complete which i've already saved so i'm not going to say but you should be able to do this with the relative ease at this point you want to go in and verify that Maya has saved what you need and you can do that by going to the folder and taking a look at whether or not you have your animation saved and I'm looking at mine right here so we've got yoga one got anim yoga complete dot anim alright wonderful so when I want to delete an animation now sort of test that I can bring it in and it'll be fine I come up here and sometimes I've gone in and I have clicked on delete all by type animations things like that I really don't like to use this it's very destructive and sometimes you can delete things that you don't intend to especially with a complex rig and you can blame Maya but you're still the one left holding the pieces so what I've learned to do instead is to come up and Congrats you can come over to keys and I don't actually use delete I use cut cut seems to do a very nice job trimming around all the animated curves and leaving all the curves that are necessary for the rig to work so I like to prefer to use cut and I just make it you know grab everything hierarchy again below time range all those are those are pretty substantial it looks like it has cut all the animations and if I scrub through the timeline I can validate this because the character doesn't do anything so here I'm scrubbing through the timeline and this character stays absolutely still could verify it further by going all the way up at the top of the hierarchy clicking on windows going to nation editor's graph editor and seeing that there's nothing to dude control this dude has no control if I press shift and I click on the plus seven plus sign inside the square I can see that even though it opens up to everything the only curves I have are these sort of suspicious-looking ones which are part of the rig and those are fine to leave alone you know if you get things like rotate ax and that's because the heel is attached to different rotations then you're good so those are only things that you need to have attached and don't mess with that so this character has no more animation and now we can read it back on so you want to go again to the very top of the hierarchy and come over to import this time go to the options and you want to import you should have an import at the bottom of your selectable x' here and an import and you want to make sure that you've got the entire clipboard selected and you want to preserve replace the entire curve just whatever's there destroy it bring in everything don't be cute and try to touch it or manipulate it or whatever so click on import you're going to go to the folder where you saved it then click on yoga complete am import and boom the character is now moving and I'm scrubbing along the timeline here so now we can go in and see things that although they look it looks like the character is pretty complete if we just go through we say well now wait a minute take a look there the leg needs a little better waiting there come in really close it helps us identify places and things we might have missed for whatever reason so that we know that that needs a little more love because look when the when the heel turns sure when it goes up it's when the heel actually goes up on its toe and then turns that things are kind of kind of wonky same thing over here with this leg it looks okay when it goes forward briefly no it doesn't but it does identify things that you need to go over for waiting and you don't you can then continue up to the the characters torso well that looks that looks okay with the torso except oh right there these kind of wings sticking out when the character soon as the tipos see that so this needs a little love there too and you can say oh yeah the waiting needs to happen with the face there's too much still there's there's too many things that are sort of so half bending with the neck and it does a good job of just identifying where you need to make sure the character is weighted and you can do a pass on this character you can then improve the weighting while this animation is playing and then delete the animation off the character rather cut the keys off and now you've got a better weighted character and if you bring in a more complex mesh later or if you have a similar bipedal character that you use this rigging script to build you can cut and paste that animation onto it and if you so desire as I did this morning you can go into the craft editor grab only the things that are translated and double them in their value so that they go out longer if the character has longer arms where they come in tighter if the character has tighter runs anyway so that's how you can cut and paste animations amongst your rigs you certainly can do this as well with animations for your character that you've saved previously and it's a great way to share just the animation file since it's pennies on the dollar look how small that is as opposed to say the mesh it's really a significant difference if it's just the animation anime information so you can do this with any amount of rigs that are the same as far as their hierarchy and it should help your workflow significantly alright you happy animating

Channel: Scott Easley

Views: 27,890

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Id: IZwp-dGeapk

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019